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Web Survey Bibliography

Title The Distinctiveness of Online Research: Descriptive Assemblages, Unobtrusiveness, and Novel Kinds of Data in the Study of Online Advocacy
Year 2013
Access date 29.04.2013
Abstract

The proliferation of research investigating online phenomena has pushed scholars to develop and practice new methodological opportunities around an increasingly wider array of contents, tools, and applications hosted and enabled by digital technologies. Yet, this chapter argues, while most studies have focused on online research methods’ ability to offer vast, increasingly real-time data, few have considered the deeper theoretical implications of a fast-changing and fast-expanding digital ecosystem, particularly in respect to the widespread availability of new research objects and new classes of data online. Using three examples from research in online advocacy conducted in the past four years on Kiva.org, the world’s first Web-based person-to-person microfinance platform, the chapter documents how, at the intersection of novel methods, emerging digital affordances, and new classes of data, there lies a possibility to capture and express the distinctiveness of online methods.

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Year of publication2013
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